At some stage, anyone involved with marketing products and services feels pressure starting to mount. It's hard work to publish a regular stream of relevant, topical, and valuable content. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Coming up with ideas for content is the hardest part of the process. The key to good content marketing is to think more in terms of getting best value from the ideas you have.
What that means is being able to recycle content in different mediums and for different purposes. While some people might turn up their noses at the idea of repurposing content, it actually makes a lot of sense.
Has this ever happened to you? You've invested a great deal of time, energy and other resources into creating a video or blogpost or some other piece of content. You share it, but then find that only a fraction of your intended audience saw it. This can happen for various reasons, such as:
The timing of the post.
They're not subscribed to your channels or newsletter.
They prefer to consume content in a different medium.
The tendency is to think that the messaging is no good, and you should just move on to something else. You could be right, and you should always scrutinise your content and ask yourself whether it's useful to your target audience. However, it's more likely that the issue is getting eyes on your content, and tailoring it for a variety of audience habits and behaviours. So, the easier and more efficient solution is actually to try again.
You don’t have to repeat the piece exactly as you positioned it the first time. Actually, it is preferable that you don’t. Because with even the slightest change, you not only increase the chance of reaching the audience you missed in the first place, but you can also ensure those who saw it the first time around appreciate it in a new way.
Let's look at an example.
An interior design company promotes a written article about the branding benefits of a no-frills office makeover. When they write the feature, their marketing team also record a short video. This is an interview with the designer about the dos and don’ts of an office redesign, covering the same territory as the blog post. From this starting point, they can maximise the impact of their work with the following steps:
Run the blog post with a photo.
A week later, run the video interview, which links back to the blog post.
Top and tail the existing content with a new intro and outro to freshen it up further.
Share the video on social media and invite followers' feedback on their experiences of good and bad office design.
Use the feedback to form the basis of a new feature, and perhaps also a podcast.
Before the end of the year, run a "greatest hits and misses" rewrite on office design that incorporates much of the existing content.
There is nothing wrong with this sort of content marketing. You can think of it as something like what department stores do when they refresh their feature windows. The merchandise inside is essentially the same. But you’re catching the consumers’ eye in new ways.
So each time you go to the trouble of creating new marketing content, think about this. How can you repurpose it for different audiences, different channels and different mediums?
A little bit of effort can go a long way.